How ad companies can track you without cookies

Today I read an article by Kev Quirk about how browser fingerprinting works. In his article (I recommend to read it) he not only explains how websites can use the various information your browser sends to give you an almost unique fingerprint, but he also linked to a tool called “Panopticlick” by the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation).

In my browser (Firefox), I have tracking protection enabled and also uBlock Origin installed and tried to run this tool. But somehow it didn’t work and when I looked at the browser console, I saw a few errors:

ReferenceError: Fingerprint2 is not defined

It seems like the multiple filter list in uBlock Origin are blocking the script which should calculate the fingerprint. So I whitelisted it with the following custom filter rule:

@@||panopticlick.eff.org/static/fp2.js$script,domain=panopticlick.eff.org

The result I got from Panopticlick:

Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 227,386 tested in the past 45 days. Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 17.79 bits of identifying information.

Interactions & Comments